You May Ask Yourself, How Did I Get Here?

See that baby in the photo? That sparkling soul is Baby Lone Tree,* who was conceived in Lone Tree, Colorado, at the Colorado Center for Reproductive Medicine, after a multi-year struggle with infertility and pregnancy loss. And by multi-year struggle, I mean over three years of IUI cycles, IVF cycles, miscarriages, appointments with adoption agencies, acupuncture, herbs, and tears.

During this time, every one else I knew was getting pregnant. Even the women who were having trouble getting pregnant at the beginning of my struggle were pregnant after the second year. In the middle of this, my father died of pancreatic cancer and my husband and I moved to a different state. I felt very isolated. What helped me most was the fact that, in the past, before I was even married, all of my friends who had gone through fertility treatments were totally honest about it. When my turn came, I did not feel like a freak or a failure. Okay, in my weaker moments, I did feel like both a freak and a failure, but I was able to let those feelings go to move forward because of the honesty and kindness of these women.

What does this mean for you? It means that even though I might rather keep the details of my uterus and my ovaries private, I want to pay this kindness forward. I hope that you have real world friends who will share their experiences with you. I hope that if you are having trouble getting pregnant, and have received a diagnosis of infertility, you are able to join a real, live support group, hopefully one that provides cookies. But if you don’t have these resources, or even if you do, you can come to this blog, and look at Baby Lone Tree, and know that, no matter how you build your family, whether through adoption or reproductive technology, or living child-free, there is hope for a child, or for peace, and you are not alone.

*If celebrities can name their babies Brooklyn, Rome, and Paris, after the exotic locales their babies were conceived, then so can I.